Building Bridges after a Consolidation

After years of each business unit running autonomous IT units, a major investment firm consolidated IT into a single organization and reduced staff to reduce on-going operating costs.  For a company that had seen very little change in its long history, this introduced a major cultural shock.  The senior IT leadership team needed a way to bring these various teams together into a cohesive team and needed to improve operational efficiency and reduce risk at the same time. 

Using Business Goals to Unite a Team

Working with the senior leadership team, our consultants crafted a program framework that would be used to bring the teams together with a set of common objectives based on business goals.  Following our DeepRoots™ methodology, we convened a management planning session to set the program in motion.  In it, program team established a set of program objectives that linked directly to business goals and cut across the IT organization.  Cross functional teams were created to lead specific initiatives to create enterprise processes and policies to be adopted globally.  Leadership and membership of the teams, which eventually grew to well over 100 participants, was shared amongst the various IT groups, blending them into a cohesive project team.

A Cohesive Team Producing Exponential Results

The program was launched as the flagship of an overall IT transformation effort and the senior IT leadership was overwhelmed with the results.  After only six months, the initial phases of the program had brought people from across the enterprise together into cohesive teams that have:

• Improved systems availability and cross-functional integration through the implementation of an enterprise Major Incident Management process
• Increased performance visibility and focused production oversight through the development of an objectives-based metrics correlation mode
• Reduced staff redundancy and reduced average service restoration time through the consolidation of 3 Incident Management processes into a single enterprise process
• Reduced time to produce Risk & Impact Reports to the business by 75% through the integration of Problem Analysis and Management into the Critical Incident Management Process
• Reduced on-going operational costs and improved customer satisfaction through the consolidation of 4 global Service Desks into a single, virtual enterprise Service Desk
• Reduced Time-to-Delivery and eased compliance constraints through the consolidation of multiple business-unit Release Processes into a single enterprise Release Process